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Askimet not working and comments being rejected

bobpullen
Community Gaffer
Community Gaffer
Posts: 16,869
Thanks: 4,950
Fixes: 315
Registered: ‎04-04-2007

Re: Askimet not working and comments being rejected

@spraxyt, I can't be sure but I suspect they were singular fixes/exceptions that were added.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
If I've been helpful then please give thanks ⤵

spraxyt
Resting Legend
Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
Fixes: 75
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: Askimet not working and comments being rejected


@bobpullen wrote:

... I suspect they were singular fixes/exceptions ...


Thanks @bobpullen. In which case the most significant benefit from additional reports would be to persuade them that there has to be a better solution. I wonder what their threshold for that is. Undecided

David
gladman
Grafter
Posts: 137
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎17-08-2007

Re: Askimet not working and comments being rejected

Hi Guys,  I really can't continue with this and I am now planning to move the site.  

I already have some of this done at http://173.254.28.24/~brgladma/ but the export import process has left me with hundreds of pages that have not moved well.  

Many of the links are still pointing to Plusnet's Hostopia hosted site and, worse still, many pages with formatted maths on them are going top need editing because the process of moving them has removed my MathML and mathjax display tags.  

So thanks to Hostopia and their less than helpful responnse, I am now going to have to spend days manually re-editing hundreds of pages of content.   I don't blame Plusnet for this as we can all make bad choices when we change things.   But I am very unimpressed with Hostopia who really don't seem to care about the impact their decisions have on the end users of their hosting service.  Perhaps you can point out to them that their inability to cope with this issue will cost me days if not weeks of my time.

Nevertheless, my thanks to both of you for staying with this issue.

Penny
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 1,309
Thanks: 809
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Registered: ‎05-04-2007

Re: Askimet not working and comments being rejected


@gladman wrote:

... many pages with formatted maths on them are going top need editing because the process of moving them has removed my MathML and mathjax display tags.  

So thanks to Hostopia and their less than helpful responnse, I am now going to have to spend days manually re-editing hundreds of pages of content.


Hi @gladman

I don't know the first thing about MathML and mathjax display tags : /   but I recall when hostopia moved the ccgi for the Project HappyChild site, it struck me at the time that the re-routing could have been done much more simply (and swiftly), here, had we been provided with details of "what to replace with what".

 

Reason being that I use a program called Arachnophilia (free software) which enables block-replacing any item of text with another, but can make the same change on 100 pages (ish) at a time.

 

I've been using it for a lot of years so while I always made "a complete back-up set" in the early days, before starting the changes, I have learned to trust that it will do what's required (and reliably).

I've looked at a few pages on your site, and their source code - the page content is significantly over-my-head but from the source code I'd assume that block-replaces of content would be viable, even if it's only to replace the links to the hostopia-hosted site in one hit, rather than individually.

Happy to help (if viable) - let me know, anyway.  I regularly use another type of software (not Windows grep, more powerful than that) to do block-replaces on 5000-ish pages at a time;  for those I make a whole-site-safety-copy first, but have never (thankfully) needed to revert to the safety copy.  All I'm trying to indicate here, is that if this whole task could be simplified down to "replace apples with bananas", "replace chips with doughnuts" and "replace elephants with frogs", it would probably be do-able in less than an hour (ish).

 

Regards,

Penny.

Penny Rollo * * * joined Force9 on 17/02/98 * * * with PlusNet from 2000 onwards * * * personal website at pennymidasrollo.plus.com
Project HappyChild website (free educational resources for kids and schools, plus directory of charities helping children) 1998 onwards
Superusers are not PlusNet staff but do have a direct line of communication into the business to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the Community.
gladman
Grafter
Posts: 137
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎17-08-2007

Re: Askimet not working and comments being rejected

Penny, thank you so much for your helpful thoughts.  I too have been thinking of how I might automate the process and it occurs to me that I can use a bit of Python code to synchronously pull the 'same' pages off the old and the new site, compare them and, where they differ, use the old site version to overwrite the bad page on the new site.  But I haven't yet worked out how to allow Python write access to my new site (i.e. give it the account details needed  for write acccess).  

However I am in two minds about all of this!   Do I make the effort to automate it or will it actually be quicker in the end to do it manually?  I have just done a year's worth of pages by hand in about two hours and I have six to do - so say 12 hours. Could I write, test and deploy an automated updater in 12 hours?  I am doubtful so I am inclined to just grind away at it.

But I am really grateful for the effort you have made to suggest an approach and even to help with it!  

 

Penny
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 1,309
Thanks: 809
Fixes: 8
Registered: ‎05-04-2007

Re: Askimet not working and comments being rejected


@gladman wrote:

I too have been thinking of how I might automate the process and it occurs to me that I can use a bit of Python code to synchronously pull the 'same' pages off the old and the new site, compare them and, where they differ, use the old site version to overwrite the bad page on the new site. 


... oh, that sounds somewhat more sophisticated than the elephant-frog approach : D

 

However I am in two minds about all of this!   Do I make the effort to automate it or will it actually be quicker in the end to do it manually?  I have just done a year's worth of pages by hand in about two hours and I have six to do - so say 12 hours.

... that doesn't sound so bad, then - and often it's therapeutic to have to revisit everything, just for the refreshed overview that's gained through the whole process.

 

But I am really grateful for the effort you have made to suggest an approach and even to help with it!  

... I just offered because I know how demoralising it can be to have to re-do something (over a lot of hours) simply because some other party has changed something and broken things.  hostopia made a change at server level at the end of October last year, that caused issues with the Project HappyChild site for several months - all sorted now, thankfully, but I'd have been lost without the block-replace facilities to amend scripts in the interim.  Didn't want anyone else having to do the "manual" process needlessly, that was all : )

Penny Rollo * * * joined Force9 on 17/02/98 * * * with PlusNet from 2000 onwards * * * personal website at pennymidasrollo.plus.com
Project HappyChild website (free educational resources for kids and schools, plus directory of charities helping children) 1998 onwards
Superusers are not PlusNet staff but do have a direct line of communication into the business to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the Community.